Global Briefing, April 26, 2011: Apocalypse Still

No return — Twenty five years after Chernobyl, TIME considers the disaster’s legacy and its lessons; Krista Mahr writes about what it’s like reporting in Japan’s nuclear zone.

America’s Shame — Amy Davidson’s sharp take on the Guantanamo files cuts to the dark heart of the matter: “We sacrificed our values and our moral standing for goals that were increasingly—vanishingly—distant from the ones we had been told were so urgent; or for no real reason at all,” she writes.

Flying Blind — In the Washington Post, Martin Pincus mulls the move toward unmanned drones. Is this a technological tipping point? he asks.

Wither Europe? — A shift of economic power is changing the continent’s political priorities, often in contradictory ways, says Richard Gowan. “The EU may be on the road to becoming a sort of strategic suburbia: a collection of small, quiet and obsessively inward-looking communities suspicious of the outside world,” he says.

Death in Dara’a — According to multiple reports, the crackdown in Syria is intensifying; Rania Abouzeid predicts there may well be more violence to come.

Irreligious — At team form Al Jazeera re-visits the brutal, anti-Ahmadi killings that took place in Indonesia last February. Read TIME’s account of the country’s spiritual revolution, here.

In Pictures — Light Box features Tim Hetherington’s photography from Liberia; See some of his work from Afghanistan, here.